[Seaside] state of the aubergine

Avi Bryant avi@beta4.com
Sat, 20 Apr 2002 19:08:04 -0700 (PDT)


On Sat, 20 Apr 2002, Frank Sergeant wrote:

> Say, what exactly are you using Seaside for?  That might help
> further put it into perspective for how we might be able to use it.

We're currently finishing up a Seaside application that manages ticket
sales for a group of theatres - basically a point of sale app, which has
to lead box-office agents through possibly complex combinations of sales,
subscriptions, exchanges, etc, as well as providing a lot of reporting.
One of the things that surprised me about it was that even though the
processes are quite sequential, there ended up being essentially no
coupling between the various pages.  Instead, the application is
structured as a bunch of dialogs with simple inputs and simple outputs
(eg, a page which is given a performance, and returns a set of seats, or a
page which is given a dollar amount and returns a set of payment records).
A completely different set of objects models the control flow paths of
particular transactions by calling these dialogs in sequence.  Obviously
this is the whole point of the callPage:/return: system, but it was the
first time I'd put it into practical use, and it was very interesting
to see what a huge difference it made to the overall structure of the app.

I'll be using Seaside for some other stuff this summer, but I probably
shouldn't talk about it yet ;-).